Federalist No. 68

Federalist No. 68 (Federalist Number 68) is the 68th essay of The Federalist Papers.

Federalist No. 68 was published on March 12, 1788 and probably written by Alexander Hamilton under the pseudonym Publius—the name under which all of the Federalist Papers were published. Since all of them were written under this pseudonym, who wrote what cannot be verified with certainty. Entitled "The Mode of Electing the President," Federalist No. 68 describes a perspective on the process of selecting the Chief Executive of the United States. In writing this essay, the author sought to convince the people of New York of the merits of the proposed Constitution. Federalist Number 68 is the second in a series of 11 essays discussing the powers and limitations of the Executive branch and the only one to describe the method of selecting the president.

Throughout its proceedings, the US Constitutional Convention of 1787 debated the method for selecting the president, trying to find a method that would be acceptable to all the bodies represented at the convention.

Different plans were proposed, including:

The interests of slave-holding states may have influenced the choice of the Electoral College as the mode of electing the president. James Wilson proposed the use of a direct election by the people, but he gained no support for this idea, and it was decided that the president would be elected by Congress. When the entire draft of the Constitution was considered, Gouverneur Morris brought the debate back up and decided he too wanted the people to choose the president. James Madison agreed that election of the people at large was the best way to go about electing the president, but he knew that the less populous slave states would not be influential under such a system, and he backed the Electoral College. Another factor here was the so-called Three-Fifths Compromise, which gave added power to the slave-holding states under the Electoral College which they would not have had under any likely form of popular vote.

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